SEO effectiveness of websites made with site builders
A frequent criticism of website builders like Squarespace or Wix is the sites they make are poor at SEO, with the implicit assumption WordPress is inherently superior at this and should be preferred.
What do these claims specifically refer to? Is the difference in SEO effectiveness that much? Are there any design or technical constraints that make builder-created sites inherently worse at SEO? Does it matter in practice?
Builder vendors have been in business for years and employ reasonably competent engineers. So I wonder how they could overlook such a major issue as SEO as the critics claim.
I think it's a misunderstanding of what SEO is and how it affects websites. With WordPress, you have plugins like Yoast which can give you an indication of how well your content will do in the searches.
From what I've seen, site builders haven't got plugins or tools that work similarly to Yoast so people have to put in a little more guesswork or understand the principles of SEO better to decide how they make their content.
What I think the critics refer to, at least in part, is the limited or missing metadata site builders add to pages. The tools I checked support adding the basic metadata such as titles, meta descriptions, and so on.
It's bullshit.*
Choosing between Wordpress and Squarespace will have no meaningful impact on your SEO. People who say it will don't know what they are talking about.
Both Squarespace and Wordpress provide the a good technical backbone for SEO: SSL support, mobile themes, customizable meta names and descriptions etc.
Depending on which website builder you choose you may see higher scores in Pagespeed Insights— for example Webflow will beat Squarespace. But you'll find plenty of debate around how important your pagespeed score is.
In the end: the things that will move the needle (content and links) have nothing to do with the CMS or website builder you choose. Don't get caught splitting hairs on this!
*Well, okay. Not total bullshit. Website builders like Wix had a pretty earned reputation for being bad at SEO— though they've done a lot of work to reverse that reputation.
Thanks, it makes sense.
I think the main thing SEO professionals dislike about site builders such as Squarespace is that the produced HTML is often not as clean, and many aspects are harder to customize.
If our goal is to make our website as easy as possible for Google to crawl, render, index, and understand the structure of our website and page, then yes, having a "div soup" can be a disadvantage. If you know what you're doing, you want maximum control over every single aspect. That can be hard with a site builder.
I just want to add -- there's a difference between bloggers who think that a Yoast green light means "good SEO" (which seems to be the group people in this thread are addressing) and actual SEO professionals.
And if you ask in a group of professionals, they will have plenty of stories of massive improvements in rankings thanks to migrating to WordPress from other solutions. Of course, it's hard to point to "one thing" because sites are so dynamic, but some correlations are pretty logical.
I'm just saying, I don't think there's anything "magic" about WordPress itself, but I definitely would say that if you care about SEO, it's not irrelevant which site builder (or which theme!) you pick.
I cas see how SEO professionals may want a lot of control over HTML generation and more, and hence more versatile and advanced platforms like WordPress.
SEO wise a lot of these builders created pages that loaded very slowly and was hard to edit the descriptions and meta tags.
They were also terrible on mobile.
Most have got better.
WP is actually getting worse and worse overtime. A company recently raised 6m+ to turn slow WP sites to fast static sites. Costs like $50 a month.
Right now what are the best builders for SEO (or those that suck less, if you prefer)?
I'm biased :)
I would use https://versoly.com/, I have spoke to 100s of founders, marketers and developers and believe we solved their problems.
Squarespace - can't do basic things, you have to use their UI
Webflow - need to be a designer or spend a lot of hours learning their tool
Wordpress - slow, need a developer for custom stuff, backups, security and plugin issues
There are good website builders and bad website builders. For example you could use PageSpeed Insights to see if they are fast (speed is a ranking factor).
Maybe @volkandkaya could give you a more in-depth explanation since he owns one.
Yes, page load speed is definitely a concern.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Too many variables indeed.